by Rachel Lee
Whatever Lawton had done, whatever he was up to, it had better be worth the risk.
Berlin, Germany
Lawton Caine had been in jails many times—visiting his father and later visiting suspects as an FBI agent—but he didn’t know what to expect when two guards came to get him. While it was his experience that Europe was highly civilized and very conscious of human rights, he still couldn’t help but remember flashes from old movies where the Gestapo interrogated a prisoner.
He knew he was being ridiculous, but he also knew how rough life could be in the U.S. for someone suspected of killing a police officer. Legal or illegal, batons had a way of slipping; prisoners had a way of falling….
It was something of a relief when he was ushered into a small room where Margarite awaited him.
“I’m your lawyer,” she said in English. “For the moment, anyway. You’ll have to go before the judge before the end of the day tomorrow, since you were arrested without a warrant. By then I’ll have found someone well-versed in German law for you. The judge will determine whether a warrant will be issued. If not, you are free.”
Lawton smiled sourly. “That doesn’t look likely.”
Margarite’s sigh was moderately exasperated. “I told you not to get involved.” She leaned forward, keeping her voice so low that he had to lean toward her to hear. “That is not our job. You are not John Wayne anymore. You are not a law enforcement officer. You have risked our entire unit with your actions.”
Lawton leaned back. For the first time in his life, he felt an impulse toward violence against a woman. But he was honest enough to know that the urge rose mainly from an acute awareness that she was correct and he had been wrong. Very wrong. Impulse, however justified, had gotten him suspended at the Bureau, and impulse, however justified, had gotten him arrested in the death of a European security officer. He suspected that, without proof, it was going to matter very little that he had seen the man throw a Molotov cocktail. He might not get a murder rap, but he would probably get the next best thing.
“Do not look at me that way,” Margarite said sharply. “I wasn’t the one who tried to play Superman.”
“I thought it was John Wayne?”
“You Americans. Merde! You believe your own cinema. Every man is the cavalry riding to the rescue.”
“Come off it, Margarite.”
“Why should I come off it, as you say? Look where you are sitting. You did not use your brain.”
He couldn’t exactly disagree with her. His response had been instinctive, honed by his FBI training, not the considered and careful reasoning of an intelligence agent.
“So here is how it will be,” she said firmly. “Tomorrow I will bring you an able Germany attorney, so you will have proper representation. You will say you saw the man throw the petrol bomb, but you have no proof. The Haftrichter will most certainly decide that this case must be further investigated. He will issue the warrant.”
“And then?”
She shrugged. “You can be held up to six months before trial.”
“Six months!”
“Next time, think before you act. It will save us all a lot of trouble.”
“That’s it? That’s all we can do?”
She hesitated. “I have a thought, but I must discuss it with someone who knows German law more intimately than I do. While there are many similarities between French and German law, there are of course variations. So I must speak to the expert who will represent you.”
Lawton swallowed a sigh, unwilling to give her the satisfaction. “Anyway, once they look at my fingerprints, they’ll find out—”
“Shh,” she interrupted quietly. “They will find out nothing. Jefe is dealing with that. We do have resources, Lawton.”
He took little comfort in that, especially since they didn’t have the resources to spring him from this place. “That man was running away from the explosion. I saw him throw the bomb. What true policeman would run away from something like that?”
“One who was doing something he should not have been.” Margarite shook her head. “But it appears you are the only one who knows that.”
“Didn’t you see him running?”
“You forget,” she said. “I don’t exist. I am already too visible. I cannot testify.”
Lawton figured he could be excused for feeling very little optimism about that point. In the end, all that mattered was that he had acted on long-honed instinct, and, through mischance, instead of merely capturing the subject, he had killed him. While the death had been accidental, that didn’t excuse him. He might not deserve a murder conviction, but he sure as hell deserved one for manslaughter.
He sighed and looked at Margarite. “I’m not going to walk out of here, and you know it. It wasn’t murder, but my actions led to the death of that man. There’s no way around that.”
She met his gaze head on. “One must never be too sure of an outcome.”
But he was.
Margarite felt far more concern than she wanted to admit. She couldn’t help but be troubled by the identity of the man Lawton said had thrown the bomb. Even if he had been mistaken about that part, it remained that he had chased a man who was running from the scene. That man may have been running to escape the bomb and ensuing violence. But it was not what one would expect of EU security. Lawton was right about that much.
On the way out, she stopped by the desk and said politely, “Please ensure that my client is well cared for.”
The officer at the desk looked offended. “Why should we do otherwise?”
“I know that it is hard for police to deal with someone accused of harming a police officer.”
The man shook his head. “The same rules apply to everyone.”
“Yes, I’m sure. And in this case, there was absolutely no way for my client to know he was chasing a security officer. Indeed,” she continued pleasantly, “it is surprising that a member of EU security should be fleeing such a scene.”
The desk officer shifted a bit uncomfortably. “There have been many questions,” he admitted.
Margarite was pleased to hear someone finally admit it aloud. “Yes,” she continued pleasantly. “There are many questions. I am certain you are investigating.”
“We have a task force.”
“Excellent. Throwing a petrol bomb into a crowd is a dangerous thing. And there is one thing I am certain of: my client did not do that. I was standing beside him when it happened. So that leaves the question of why my client was so certain that the man he chased was the one who threw the bomb. And if he is correct…” She trailed off and shrugged.
The desk officer nodded. “We are required to investigate his claims of innocence as thoroughly as the claims of the officers who arrested him. Nothing will happen to your client, Madame. If you would like to bring him a change of clothes and his toiletries, you may do so. He may also have books and magazines to read. He is not guilty of any crime yet, so he is not treated as a convict in our jails.”
“Of course not. I knew this. I have great faith in the professionalism of your organization.”
Still smiling, she walked out of the station and onto the street. Once there, her smile faded. A few minutes later she was seated in a busy café, in a corner away from the view of most other patrons. It was then that she pulled out her phone and called Jefe.
Washington, D.C.
Dealing with the computer nerd had been easy, Miriam thought as she headed back to her office. He was well-versed in the requirements of security, and when someone in her position asked someone in his position to erase something from the records because an agent was involved in a highly covert operation, he was only too eager to oblige. In fact, he’d blushed and been downright thrilled to be part of something so important and out of the ordinary.
She’d leaned against his desk while he made the erasure and asked, “You guys get ignored a lot, don’t you?”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “We’re supposed to be invisible.”
“Until there’s a crisis of some kind.”
At that his face lit up. “There are times when we have people breathing down our necks to acquire information faster. Sometimes it even gets exciting for me. But basically we’re just a communications node. The big agencies do the work.”
“But a communications node is essential,” Miriam said, watching his nimble fingers dance on the keyboard. “The President relies on you to keep information flowing. Heck, so does my agency. Think how much time we’d waste without you, having to send couriers back and forth. No, you’re at the very heart of America’s security.”
He’d puffed up a bit at that and grinned at her.
Then she’d added, “No one but you knows about this, and if it gets out, an agent’s life could be endangered.” She hadn’t needed to say another word. He had squared his shoulders and nodded his understanding. Under Harrison Rice, no one would dare to compromise the identity of an undercover operative.
Lawton’s fingerprints had disappeared from the national database within seconds. The geek had the clearance to do darn near anything he wanted, and removing fingerprints had been a surprisingly easy thing to do, compared to some.
“It’s easy,” the young man said, “because no one thinks anyone would do it. From our side of the wall, security is actually minimal, mostly designed to prevent accidental erasures. On the other side of the wall, it’s as impenetrable as we can make it.” He went on at some length about how things were set up to protect the national fingerprint database, while still making it possible for someone with his clearance to modify that database, all of it revolving around covert operations and a whole bunch of computer terms Miriam didn’t pretend to understand.
Still, she had stood there nodding and listening with every evidence of total attention until he assured her that Tom Lawton’s prints were gone. Completely. Not simply protected from access, but utterly erased.
Then she had patted his shoulder, told him that she was impressed with his expertise and would put in a good word for him.
Still, when she finally sat at her desk again, her stomach was in knots. She had acted out of necessity, but she had no doubts what would happen if anyone ever found out what she’d done. She might have violated the law. She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
She still struggled sometimes with the greater secret threats facing her country and her world. Even after all she had learned, a part of her wanted to return to her old view of how global power worked. But she knew she couldn’t, and that was why she had erased Lawton’s prints, which would be replaced later with some other man’s. It had been justified. But she still felt queasy. Never in her life would she have imagined manipulating a national database without explicit authorization.
She drew a steadying breath and looked around her office, reminding herself of her position. A year ago, if she had received direct authorization from the Director of National Intelligence, that would have been enough. Now she was the DNI. Her position authorized her to protect Lawton. He’d been a highly valuable asset to the United States even after his faked death had ended his FBI career. He had helped her to crack the plot to kill Grant Lawrence, as well as to stop Phillip Bentley from maneuvering the President into a nuclear war. She was not only entitled to protect him, she was obligated to do so.
But butterflies still twittered uncomfortably in her belly.
Finally she sighed, trying to release the tension, and punched the intercom that connected her to the assistant outside who was her gatekeeper, guardian and dexterous right hand. “Jacob? Please ensure that I’m undisturbed for the next ten minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then she picked up the secure phone, switched on the scrambler and called the man she knew only as Jefe.
“It’s done,” she said without preamble when he picked up the phone. “Now, tell me what’s going on.”
14
Berlin, Germany
S even years away was long enough to make Berlin feel both familiar and strange. Renate strolled the street toward the general area of yesterday’s riot, her blond hair carefully hidden beneath a dark wig, her eyes invisible behind sunglasses, although the day’s light was watery and pale, filtered through clouds.
Berlin was a large city, and in theory she should have been able to walk these streets anonymously, even without a disguise. But the Frankfurt Brotherhood knew she was still alive, and she couldn’t afford to rely on simple measures.
That led her to the sunglasses and wig, and her uncharacteristic dress: an American ballcap, a red sweatshirt proclaiming her a fan of some team called the Buccaneers, battered jeans and jogging shoes, and a backpack that seemed to be one day short of the trash heap. Gretchen Zeitgenbach would not have dressed this way, and neither would Renate Bächle.
As that thought filtered through her brain, anger and frustration began to choke her. Spying a bench, she sat on it, fists clenched, trying to regain her self-control. Self-control was all that was left to her, that and a sense of mission. But right now both deserted her, and her throat tightened with all the feelings she couldn’t ordinarily allow herself.
Her best friend had died in an accident intended to kill her. She would never have a friend like that again. No one to whom she could turn with a thought or feeling and see immediate understanding. She couldn’t afford that kind of closeness anymore. When the Brotherhood had killed her friend, they had killed her, too, in a way. They had killed an ordinary future that involved friends, marriage, children. They had truncated her humanity and her womanhood, and left nothing but ashes in her soul.
She hated them for that. Hated them for killing her family in the Black Christmas bombings in an attempt to draw her out. As the hate filled her, overruling every other sense, her vision darkened and her surroundings retreated into some distant place, leaving her with only the black crater inside herself.
At that moment she couldn’t have said who she hated more: the Brotherhood or Office 119, which had caused her to sandwich herself into an impenetrable box of calculating cool in order to perform an unquestionably important mission. The emotional amputations had wounded her as much as the personal losses.
Several trams passed by, at first only a distant noise and bustle as people boarded and descended nearby. But eventually her surroundings returned to clear focus, and the rage settled into the cold place inside her, the place that would never be warm again.
Drawing a deep breath, she tipped her head back and closed her eyes, wondering if returning to Berlin had triggered this reaction, or if something else had.
Then Lawton Caine’s face popped into her mind, reminding her that she had come here for a reason. He was in jail. Much as she had tried to tell herself he was just a colleague, apparently that wasn’t the full truth.
She was afraid of losing another friend.
Shaking her head, she rose to resume her walk.
At Centrum Judiciaum on Oranienburger Straße, she paused near a café and looked across the way at the area where the riot had occurred only yesterday. Police tape still marked off the area where the Molotov cocktail had struck, marked by broken glass and a black spot on the pavement. Dark, coppery stains and tape marks left no doubt what had happened after the bomb had exploded. Seventy meters away, another taped outline marked the end point of Lawton’s pursuit. She forced herself to note all the details clinically, even though objectivity kept trying to desert her.
And still there were protesters. Some were protesting the relocation, others the subsidies, and others the violence of the protests themselves.
Little, she found herself thinking, ever really changed. She distrusted the Muslimschutzgesetze, and while she was not surprised that some Germans supported them, she was disappointed that they were bold enough to show their bigotry on a public street. She considered that she might be unfair in this judgment, that some of those protesting in favor of the laws were sincere in their belief that this was the only way to end the
cycle of violence, and that once things calmed down the Muslims would be allowed to move freely again through Europe.
But it ought to have been obvious, she thought, that this would not be the case. For those who relocated were not only giving up their homes but often their jobs, as well. In a pattern common to immigrants, many had opened small shops and other businesses, which they were now being forced to abandon. Even if the protection laws were lifted, they would have nothing to go back home to. No matter how much Soult might talk of it being a temporary measure, it was a permanent upheaval for those involved.
And then there was the stigma of belonging to an ethnic group singled out for special “protection.” Muslims who had lived and worked for years with non-Muslims were now unavoidably cast as “others.” Once having made that distinction, it would be all but impossible to return to being simply Hans and Ibrahim, two men who worked at the same factory, lived in the same neighborhood, ate at the same restaurants and cheered for the same football clubs.
Renate understood the late chancellor’s willingness to pull Germany out of the EU. While the new administration was offering housing subsidies, she knew there was no way to compensate for the other losses that German Muslims would endure in the relocation. This was not a solution.
Still, she was torn. She was a German by birth and by heritage, and whatever had happened in her life, she would always be German. Yet she believed in the ideals of the EU and did not want to see it torn apart. But her first loyalty was now to Office 119 and the United Nations, which thus far had characterized Soult’s plans as “an unfortunate but temporary response to growing civil unrest.”